リウマチ性疾患の温泉治療に関する臨床的研究

第2報 関節リウマチ患者の Thorn 氏試験とこれに及ぼす温泉浴の影響

抄録

The author studied the effect of hot-spring bathing on the pituitary adrenocortical function of rheumatoid arthritis patients by means of Thorn's test, employing Nomin-no-yu and thermal water of the University Hospital (sulfated spring), and obtained the following conclusion.
1) Unusual count of eosinocytes can be found among persons who are apparently healthy, and who cannot be the good subject of Thorn's test. Such unusual cases were excluded. Thorn's test revealed that the reduction of eosinocytes were more than -50.0% (an average of -55.2%) in most of healthy persons (11 out of 15 cases).
2) The number of eosinocytes in blood of almost all healthy persons decreased through hot-spring bathing, showing a decrease of 15.8% on an average, which shows that hot-spring bathing has an action similar to that of ACTH. Such a phenomenon will be more pronounced with the initiation of balneotherapy, showing the rate of decrease as high as 35.3% on an average. Namely, the action of hot-spring bathing similar to that of ACTH tends to be intensified with the initiation of balneotherapy.
3) Thorn's test in rheumatoid arthritis patients revealed that the number of those in whom the rate of decrease was more than 50.0% was about equal to that of those in whom the rate of decrease was less than 50.0%, showing an average rate of 50.8%, which is almost similar to that of the healthy subject. In the case of those who had been suffering from rheumatoid arthritis more than a year, both the stage of progress of symptoms (stage) and the class of dysfunction (class) were high, and in such cases, the rate of eosinocyte decrease in Thorn's test was clearly less and the lowering of pituitary adrenocortical function was also observable.
4) It was clearly observed that Thorn's test on rheumatoid patients, when performed together with balneotherapy, showed an increase of the rate of eosinocyte decrease in the most of cases. At the same time it also increased generally the excreted urinary 17KS in those patients. Balneotherapy performed in combination with medicamenttherapy increased the rate of eosinocyte decrease in most cases. The increase was especially clear in those in whom the rate of decrease had been less than 50.0% before the initiation of balneotherapy. However, improvements of Thorn's test did not necessarily go in parallel with therapeutic effect and improvement in symptoms.
5) These findings show that the changes observable in Thorn's test provide us with a guide in balneotherapy of rheumatoid arthritis and are useful in explaining the balnectherapeutic effect in rheumatic disease.